Considering that, Ookiku Furikabutte is quite a rare breed of manga, which combines both grassroots and competitiveness in a highly popular sport. No all-star player is leading the charge, and the coach is also inexperienced. While there are experienced players. and even an amazing one, Nishiura high school's baseball team is far from having a great cast of players. There are only 10 players, a mere one substitute on the bench. The fields were unmaintained--overgrown with weeds and grass-- and had to be maintained from scratch by the Coach.
Despite this, the team forges on. Unlike a conventional sports manga, where the team has a platitude of facilities, budget, and experienced seniors and coaches, Nishiura's grassroots baseball team only has freshmen. They go through a lot of pain and struggles because of these setbacks. With the little budget, the coach and the parents of the baseball players all pitch in money to afford all of the necessities. Players don't have actual uniforms outside of their game ones. When they go to training camp, they get a massive discount because they're also cleaning the fields, and to save even more money, they scour the forests for food to eat and cook. The players have to deal with not having a field to practice on, best practices on what to work on in batting form, and so on. Personal connections have to be called in by the Coach for there to be proper baseball mentors and guidance.
This grassroots club atmosphere spreads from player to player and is reflected in all of the chapters. There is quite a lot of slice of life scenes, despite the manga still being a majority about baseball. You get to see the variety and freedom that a grassroots club has, though. There's no specific training regime, and you always see the players trying different things to improve. They go to other schools to observe how other schools practice. They go to games to scout. They go to a joint practice to interact with other schools they never would have been able to meet.
That being said, sometimes, the character interactions doesn't flow well. In particular, there are a couple of chapters dedicated to entirely about how the players agree to not have any romantic relationships while in the baseball club. This just felt like an author self-insert telling the reader "there won't be any romance focus in this manga." It just didn't feel like a conversation adolescent high school students would ever have, let alone unanimously agree on.
Each baseball game they play, when it gets to be shown, is very detailed. There are a lot of player dynamics and relationships from player to player due to the small number of players in the club, so everyone knows each other. No one is competing for a regular spot, since everyone is guaranteed one, so everyone forges a bond with each other. Yet even with a guaranteed spot, no one slacks off. I go over the characters in more detail in my anime review, so I won't go very in-depth for this one
What are the pros and cons of this approach of a competitive grassroots team? Well, there are a lot of slice-of-life activities tied to baseball and a lot of character depth to the small character pool. But the obvious flaw is that you're going to be spending a very large amount of chapters reading pretty mundane things, like dedicating 5 chapters of 50 pages to the joint practice camp or something. Well, that's the price of detail-oriented manga like this. Things that could be skipped will not be. As a result, despite there being hundreds of chapters being released, and over a decade of steady releases, the manga has only reached the second year of high school despite only displaying a few key games for the team.
